We examined the cardiovascular physiology of guilt and pride to elucidate physiological substrates underpinning the behavioral motivations of these moral emotions. Although both emotions motivate prosocial behavior, guilt typically inhibits ongoing behavior, whereas pride reinforces current behavior. To succeed in eliciting real emotions, we used a novel social interaction task. We found dissociable sympathetic activation during guilt and pride; specifically, Guilt participants experienced prolonged cardiac sympathetic arousal as measured by preejection period (PEP), whereas Pride participants experienced transient non-cardiac somatic arousal and a shift to low frequency (LF) power in the cardiac spectrogram. This dissociation supports their distinctive motivational functions. Higher self-reported Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) sensitivity was furthermore uniquely associated with guilt, supporting its function as a punishment cue.

Previous research suggests that (a) racial group membership attenuates empathy, and subsequent prosocial helping behaviour, towards out-group members, and (b) helping behaviour is modified by the potential helperâ??s pool of cognitive resources. It remains unclear, however, how cognitive load influences empathy and helping towards racial in- versus out-group members. We investigated this question using a sample of 30 White females. After completing either a high or a low cognitive-load task, participants viewed video clips depicting distressed White or Black females. We examined cardiovascular responses, self-reported empathic responses, and helping behaviour in response to the clips. We found no effect of racial group membership on empathic responding or on helping behaviour across cognitive-load conditions. However, results suggested that high cognitive load attenuates empathic responding, leading to decreased helping behaviour towards both racial in- and out-group members. Interestingly, a high internal motivation to respond without prejudice was associated with increased helping towards out-group members, but only under conditions of low cognitive load.